Barbara Brown Taylor - Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

ABRAHAM HESCHEL

I AM NOT A SCIENTIST. IT IS TRUE THAT I RECEIVED a small microscope for my ninth birthday and gave myself headaches by looking into it for hours at a time. The first thing I saw was a hair plucked from my own head, as fat and shiny as a tarred telephone pole. After that, I tried everything that would fit below the eyepiece: flower petals, dirt, a page torn from the telephone book. I spent the better part of an afternoon with a dropper full of pond water, andonce I had worked up my nervewith a smear of my own blood that was as beautiful to me as a red stained glass window.

The next year there was a chemistry set, with all the requisite explosions, followed by an electromagnetic device that made all the hairs on my arm stand up. When my fifth-grade science class studied genetics, I went to the pet store and bought a dozen mice. Half of them were white with pink eyes. The other half had dark fur and black eyes. My project was to breed a white mouse with black eyes, orif that turned out to be impossiblethen at least to produce a dark mouse with pink eyes.

I do not remember whether or not I succeeded, but I do remember that I midwifed quite a lot of mice. There were the inevitable mutants, including a small white mouse that did nothing but turn round and round in tiny circles all day, and a mother mouse who ate each of her newborn babies in turn. By the time it was all over, there was a small colony of escapees who lived in the basement and one lone fugitive who somehow got loose in the family car. We never saw him, but sometimes we could hear him chewing the upholstery inside the seats, and once we found a little nest he had made in the trunk.

After I arrived at high school, my interest in science waned. When I balked at dissecting the same kind of mice I had spent months breeding, a classmate helpfully explained the problem to me. In the first place, he said, I was a girl, and girls were notoriously bad at science. In the second place, he said, I made As in English, which was a sure sign that my mind was tuned more to words than to mice. His advice was that I should save myself a lot of grief by steering clear of science altogether. What use would someone like me ever have for logarithms or the periodic table?

Taking his advice, I avoided math and all the other sciences along with it, which meant that I did not see much more of him. I spent my time with the editors of the school literary magazine, who wrote poetry and read Kafka. When we walked by the chemistry lab we held our breath, to avoid inhaling sulfurous fumes. As far as we were concerned, we were as different from the people inside as birds were from bats. I cannot remember anyone in high school who violated this academic caste system. If you belonged to the Drama Club, you did not join the Science Club. If you were good at trigonometry, you assumed you would never understand the allegory in